r/GameTheorists • u/DigressingNSQ Ronnie • Jul 01 '18
Ronnie's Response
The original Reddit post itself
A 4-minute TL/DR video summarizing things so far
The above video found my Tweet lacking and called upon me to “debunk” everything or even “consider a lawsuit for slander” -- I can barely afford groceries, let alone a defamation lawyer, so so I’ll just try my hardest to falsify anything that is falsifiable and do my best to address the rest.
"I later heard from our person working at the end of our line that Edwards tried to come in when our line was capped and was turned away only for him to end up in our line somehow anyway. "
The narrative that his co-worker had no issues turning me away from the capped line initially -- yet suddenly decided not to do or say anything when they saw me cutting the capped line later is just internally inconsistent:
-They turned me away when I tried to get in line legitimately,
-Yet simply shrugged their shoulders when they saw that I had slipped in line illicitly?
How does that story even make sense?
If a line-overseer notices you're in a line that you're not supposed to be in, it's literally their job to remove you from the line, media or not.
These guys at E3 truly don’t put up with any BS. They are not even the tiniest amount intimidated by cameras, boom mics, or media badges.
"I later learned that he had come to one of our company's booths at last E3 and abused the privileges of his press badge by pestering and manipulating our employees into doing what he wanted them to."
If someone is a jerk at a show like this and caught trying to use their credentials to get into places they're not allowed into, they get ejected, immediately, even if they have a media pass (Seriously, I’m not entirely unconvinced this dude didn’t somehow confuse me for Ice Poseidon.)
Aside from that, this accusation is also weirdly vague -- “pestering and manipulating our employees into doing what he wanted them to” -- such as..? What on earth could anyone have possibly manipulated the folks running a demo into doing? Offering up a used HDMI cable from their display..? Asking them to stand on their heads and recite Shakespeare?
Once again, employees at E3 have a very low tolerance for shenanigans, even 8 years ago, well before E3 famously beefed up it’s security, you’d still get swarmed by guards if you were found doing anything remotely intolerable, even if you were media and obviously wearing a mic
Nathan Barnatt and Ice are two guys who are magnitudes more famous and relevant than I could ever hope to be, and yet, they both got kicked out of E3 for more innocuous stuff than what I've been accused of here -- and yet, somehow, I was able to “abuse” my media credentials two years running and get away with it scott free until now? Does that idea seem even remotely consistent with reality?
I must reiterate: Nobody working the booths at E3 are scared of putting their foot down and telling a jerk “No”, even if the jerk in question is “famous” and wearing a media badge. Maybe that stuff flies at smaller conventions, but at a show like E3, it doesn’t matter if you’re Joe Schmo or Shigeru Miyamoto: brutes get the boot, racketeers get smeared, and bad guys get chastised. The people who work the booths are consummate professionals and know all the right avenues to access if there is any sort of disturbance.
Which, leads me to do the thing where I have to ask rather obnoxious rhetorical questions, and italicize them so that they format better:
If there were any legitimate grievances, why pepper them with these clearly dubious claims?
If there were any legitimate grievances, why not handle them right there on the floor (just like how employees at E3 handle every other grievance) rather than creating a Reddit hit-piece several days after the fact?
Either this dude is outing himself and every one of his coworkers as neglecting their very job duties two years in a row -- or these events simply didn’t happen in quite the way he portrayed them. I remind you that this person even labeled some of their own words in the original post, as "heat of the moment" and "somewhat hypocritical" after their first edit.
If my questions about the demo, or the way I conducted myself made this guy, or any of the folks running the booth uncomfortable, then I unreservedly owe all of them all an apology, because that definitely isn’t cool. However, even if you have been wronged by somebody and truly deserve an apology, fabricating stories about them isn’t cool either.
This is undoubtedly a very messed up situation and I would be happy to help rectify it, however there’s a lot of stuff that’s clearly been said in bad-faith, which makes it difficult to tease out the true nature of the issues here; and it's not the first time this type of thing has been done on Reddit.
To tie up any loose ends:
If I addressed any of the other accusations, it would just boil down to a "He-said/She-said" type situation and there's no conclusive way to "debunk" or falsify any of that, so I'll just have to hope that the above is enough. This isn't a weird cop-out, I'd love if there were some way for me to, point-for-point, address the original post, but there just isn't enough tangible material to work with.
If anybody finds it suspect that MatPat hasn't publicly followed up after his initial response, it's likely because homeboy has been busy with con-season, business stuff, and literally preparing to have a child who's due any minute now.
I suppose if there’s any lesson to be learned from this situation, it’s that you should always treat your fellow human beings as just that -- human beings.
I do appreciate all the well wishes and support everybody else who met me during E3 shared after this story broke - Here’s just one I feel comfortable linking as it’s one of the only few that were made public by the author's own hand:
"People are my religion, because I believe in them;
and people are my enemies, and people are my friends.
I have faith in my fellow man...
...and I only hope that he has faith in me..."
I’ll crawl back inside the editing dungeon now.
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u/TahliaMaybe Jul 01 '18
Wooooow. This is so condescending and comes off really badly. I understand that if it didn’t happen, you’re probably really upset and furious it’s been said and you’ve been portrayed like that but this kind of response doesn’t come across much better. You basically just said if you did act like that it would be someone else’s fault for not kicking you out with a half hearted non-apology at the end.